Austerity politics, war in the Middle East and at other borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, the emergence of populist parties and politicians, Islamophobia and the refugee crisis are amongst the recent developments suggesting the need for discussions about the theories and concepts that academic disciplines provide for making sense of societal, cultural and political transformations. In this article, we focus on the capacities of feminist political theories to undertake this task. By assessing different feminist approaches to (...) political analysis that range from focusing on women and men, to analysing gender, to doing intersectionality and to adopting post-structural and new materialist approaches, we explore the contributions and the limitations of each framework. This allows us to consider where feminist theoretical debates on gender and politics currently are, to assess old and new developments and to address lacunae in the debate. Our argument is that dominant approaches in political science influence the emergence and marginalisation of particular feminist frameworks for political analysis, but also that feminist theorising of gender and politics, in striving for recognition within mainstream political science, reproduces its own hegemonies and marginalisations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTstudies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class ‘exceptions’ – they may achieve academically at university but experience various exclusions and self-exclusions in areas of social life. By drawing on a very small sample of ‘counter-evidence’ and ‘exceptions within exceptions’ – working-class students who achieve great social accomplishments at (...) elite universities – this paper further explores the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in negotiating class domination and the possibilities of transcendence. We demonstrate the creative and transformative ways in which class domination is dealt with and document the prevalence of high-level reflexivity. Furthermore, we distinguish different forms and degrees of reflexivity, which then indicate the ‘contingency’ of reflexivity – the relation of the possibilities of reflexivity to the unequal distribution of social, cultural and economic capitals. We further argue that what appears to be a form of self-emancipation achieved by the ‘transcending group’ in our study also involves the discrete and insidious reproduction of social inequality. (shrink)

This article engages critically with issues surrounding the theorization of the self and body relation, where the body is interpreted as material increasingly open to human intervention and choice. It is argued that this theorization rests upon a mind/body split that limits an understanding of embodied identity. The significance for feminism of undermining representational practices that rely upon this dualism are outlined and criticized for reproducing the logic of representation they set out to destabilize. An alternative strategy is examined and (...) the argument is made that to understand embodied identity the question must not be what do bodies mean but what can they do. Here feminist approaches that rely upon a radically different ontological position in order to move beyond the mind/body split are utilized. These theoretical debates are made meaningful through the lens of self narratives produced by young women–a context which demands the development of strategies for theorizing lived bodies. (shrink)

Feminists are starting to look to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in the hope that it might provide a useful framework for conceptualising the tension between structure and agency in questions of gender. This paper argues that Bourdieu’s analysis of gender can indeed be useful to feminists, but that the options Bourdieu offers for change are problematic. The paper suggests that Bourdieu’s analysis of gender echoes the work of earlier radical feminists, particularly Catharine MacKinnon, in important ways. Consciousness-raising, one of (...) MacKinnon’s strategies for change, sits well with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, despite Bourdieu’s own scepticism. The paper argues that recasting the role of consciousness-raising in Bourdieu’s theory helps to undermine the deterministic elements of his work. It concludes that a feminist turn to Bourdieu as an attempt to understand gender’s entrenchment-andmalleability can be fruitful, and that such a turn might find a re-engagement with the idea of consciousness-raising helpful. (shrink)

This thesis provides three core arguments. The first core argument is a criticism of ‘identity’ views of metaphysics, in particular Haslangerian social constructivist metaphysics. Having made this criticism, I argue in favour of using the notion of ‘habitus’ from Bourdieu to account for the functional signature traditionally associated with identity, and apply this way of thinking about social metaphysics to social class. The second core argument applies social constructivist metaphysics to the issue of situated knowledge. I argue that we can (...) conceive of much of situated knowledge as being knowledge-how, rather than propositional knowledge. I do this by arguing that only knowledge-how can justify the social epistemic norms that are ascribed to situated knowledge. The third core argument applies this view of situated knowledge to political philosophy. I argue against the interpretation of my previous arguments as supporting epistocracy, and in doing so combine Thomas Christiano's instrumentalist argument for democracy with the demographic argument against epistocracy, creating a new 'demographic instrumentalist' argument for democracy. The sum of these three core arguments is an argument for the importance of maintaining a diverse set of decision-makers in political decision making. (shrink)

The critical realist and Bourdieusian conceptions of action fundamentally disagree on a number of fronts: the synthetic versus dualistic relationship between structure and agency; the social nature of the self/body; the link between morphogenesis and reflexivity. Despite these differences, this article argues that re-reading Bourdieu’s theories with attention to some of the core tenets of critical realism (emergence, the stratification of reality, and conjunctural causality) can provide insights into how the habitus is capable of reflexivity and social change. In particular, (...) this article reworks Bourdieu’s theory of habitus by suggesting that social selves are always situated at the intersection of multiple and competing social locations (or field positions) and that the habitus itself is always layered. Reflexivity arises from horizontal disjunctures (between field positions) and vertical disjunctures (across temporal sedimentation). (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: (...) that a person’s inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transformative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies. (shrink)

Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of (...) self-interpretation that introduce more active dimensions into understandings of subject formation and agency. Furthermore, an unqualified notion of indeterminacy does not unpick the imbrication of relations of time and power that overdetermine agency. Ultimately, structural accounts of subject formation need to be integrated more closely with hermeneutic perspectives of the self in order to understand better the complexities of agency in a post-traditional society. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of ‘misrecognition’, ‘condescension’ and ‘consent and complicity’ to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because (...) it provides a richer insight into the ‘workings’ of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men. (shrink)

This article considers two themes in Butler's work: the dialectic of subject formation - that the autonomous subject is instituted through constraint - and the relation between the psyche and the social. With regard to the former, the introduction of a notion of historicity into a conception of the symbolic yields a concept of agency. Nonetheless, this concept of agency still lacks social specificity. By reconfiguring the psyche as an effect of the interiorization of social norms, Butler introduces the destabilizing (...) force of the category of the unconscious into constructivist accounts of identity. This sociocentric reworking of the psyche-social relations provides a nuanced account of gender identity, but it results in a negative model of action as the displacement of constraining social norms. It is also important for a conception of agency to include an account of the creative dimensions of action where actors actively appropriate conflicting socio-cultural values to institute new collective forms of identity. (shrink)

The present essay discusses the value of citizenship as shared fate in sites of ethnic conflict and analyzes its implications for citizenship education in light of three issues: first, the requirements of affective relationality in the notion of citizenship-as-shared fate; second, the tensions between the values of human rights and shared fate in sites of ethnic conflict; and third, the ways in which citizenship education might overcome these tensions without falling into the trap of psychologization and instrumentalization, but rather focusing (...) on providing opportunities for social and school practices that manifest shared fate and compassion in critical ways. It is argued that what teachers and schools should try to do is to make practices of shared fate and compassion possible through creating conditions for children and young people to experience what it means to enact such practices in sites of ethnic conflict. It is also suggested that teachers and schools in sites of ethnic conflict cannot produce ‘new’ citizens on the basis of any values, no matter how ‘noble’ these values may be. The most that can be done is to help children and young people to critically reflect upon the conditions under which people in sites of ethnic conflict can act on the basis of shared fate and compassion and provide support so that these possibilities can become realistic. (shrink)

Motivated by a call for risk discourse research in non-Western settings, this study examines how Vietnamese road safety video advertisements are constructed and interpreted. Following a literature review of risk and gender, the study first sets out socio-semiotic multimodal analysis of video advertisements to detail how concepts of risk and gender are constructed. Afterwards, I take an ethnographic-based approach in a series of interviews with professional Vietnamese women to gain insights into these concepts. Findings of the study reveal the expected (...) female roles as wives and mothers in Vietnamese advertising as interpreted by Vietnamese women. The study contributes to an understanding of risk in this Asian setting and opens up the potential for a critical, interpretive approach to risk discourses that are grounded in lived experiences. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore existing conceptualisations of emotional capital in educational research, and to undertake a critical analysis of these conceptualisations, including a reflection on my own explorations of teachers' and students' emotional practices. Drawing from Bourdieu's work, I offer a theoretical discussion of how emotional capital as a conceptual tool suggests a historically situated analysis of the often unrecognised mechanisms and emotion norms serving to maintain certain 'affective economies'. This point is made in reference to a brief discussion (...) of my ongoing ethnographic work over the last ten years. I conclude the article with outlining some new possibilities of theorising the potentiality and usefulness of the concept of emotional capital in the field of educational research. (shrink)

This article deploys a Bourdieusian framework to analyse the process of how children are located in, and attached to, families. The focus is on children whose placement is problematic for some reason (such as adoption, egg and semen donation, surrogacy and so on). Through a detailed examination of four case studies in which the placement of children is disputed, I show how notions of embodied spaces (such as the womb) are part of the repertoire of arguments used for establishing claims (...) as to the appropriate placing of such children. However, I also show how the significance of such spaces is relative to the importance attached to other spaces (e.g. geographical, domestic, metaphorical). The analysis demonstrates the usefulness of Bourdieu’s central concepts but also shows how those concepts might be both supplemented and challenged. (shrink)

Cultural capital and hegemonic masculinity are two concepts that have received intense attention. While both have received serious consideration, critique and analysis, the context or field-specificity of each is sometimes ignored. They have been used in a diversity of ways. Using ethnographic and interview data from a US male bodybuilding community, this study highlights one useful employment. Hegemonic masculinity takes different shapes in different fields of interaction, acting as a form of cultural capital: gender capital. Inherent in this discussion are (...) the cultural contradictions apparent among individuals striving for either physical or ideological embodiments of gender capital. Individuals can attempt to embody hegemonic idealizations, but bodies are not only inscribed with gender, inscriptions are read, and read differently by different social actors and in different settings. The capacity of gender capital to remain elusive is precisely what enables gender practices and projects like bodybuilding to retain passionate participation. (shrink)

Social theorists in recent years have concerned themselves with the matter of the kind and intensity of people’s everyday reflective capacities. In this respect, Bourdieu has mostly been found wanting. This article seeks to counter this sentiment with recourse to an ‘anti-mechanistic’ reading of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It begins by arguing that in imposing a strict delineation between consciousness and habitus, Bourdieu and his critics alike at times unwittingly conflate habitus and mechanistic habit, at once vaunting conscious deliberation and (...) neglecting the non-habitual acts that habitus makes possible. Next it turns to the treatment, within the mechanistic reading, of the notion of the ‘social world’. The argument is that in this reading the social world is reified and rendered the mere background or setting for social practices rather than the product of those practices. Without recognition of this latter quality, the social world becomes hypostatized and exists outside of time. The secondary aim, then, is to argue for a thoroughgoing temporal relation to social reality in Bourdieu’s theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the dominant view of reflexivity in contemporary social science is overly decontextualized, despite the value that reflexivity scholars have placed on the dynamic and active nature of individual thought and action. While this problem has been highlighted before, in terms of how habitual actions shape the way that individuals engage in reflexive thought, little attention has been given to the ways in which non-internalized elements of the environment condition this process. I illustrate my argument (...) with examples from Tocqueville’s classic text Democracy in America. I demonstrate how Tocqueville provided a framework for analyzing the way that societal-level norms and opportunity structures impact personal reflexive capacities. In this respect, his work is unparalleled and as such remains relevant to contemporary debates. I therefore argue for the application of Tocqueville’s work into arenas it has seldom entered. (shrink)

This article seeks to situate the athletic activities of Spartiates and their unmarried daughters during the Classical period in their broader societal context by using theoretical perspectives taken from sociology in general and the sociology of sport in particular to explore how those activities contributed to the maintenance of social order in Sparta. Social order is here taken to denote a system of interlocking societal institutions, practices, and norms that is relatively stable over time. Athletics was a powerful mechanism that (...) helped to generate consensus and to socialize and coerce individuals. It thus induced compliance with behavioral norms on the part of both females and males and thereby contributed meaningfully to the maintenance of social order in Sparta. Athletics inculcated conformity to norms that called for females to be compliant, beautiful objects of male desire. Athletics had an equally profound effect on Spartan males because it inculcated compliance with norms that valorized subordination of the individual to the group, playing the part of the soldier, and meritocratic status competition. Athletics may well have also to some degree empowered both Spartan females and males, but its liberatory dimensions can easily be unduly amplified. There is an ever-present dialectic in athletics, between its ability to reinforce norms that underpin the prevailing social order and its ability to foster individual autonomy. In the case of Sparta, the balance in that dialectic always inclined very much toward the former. (shrink)

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and incorporating insights from feminist and critical race and legal scholarship on the creation of “subjugated knowledge,” this article investigates the dispositional production of perceptions of injustice, politics, and morality among differently situated members of a subordinated population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within and across the West Bank and the Israeli city of Lod, I track how the political rhetoric that Lod Palestinians use to describe key issues in their lives—for example, drug use and (...) dealing, and poor formal education—differs from the moral judgments through which West Bank Palestinians, who have moved to the city and remain there precariously, interpret the same issues. This article traces this interpretive divergence to two dispositional formations: one that has emerged under protracted conditions of denigration, criminalization, and surveillance in Lod and the other that has been produced over time by military rule in the West Bank and imported to Lod by West Bank Palestinians who moved there. It concludes by calling attention to the role of dispositions in studies of identity-formation and boundary-work as well as issues of submission and resistance in contexts of subordination. (shrink)

Many feminist sociologists would agree that most breastfeeding research to date has been primarily undertaken from the perspective of medical and public health discourses. While there is evidence of a shift in research on breastfeeding to qualitative studies that focus on the lived experiences of breastfeeding women, this article addresses a number of concerns remaining in the literature surrounding breastfeeding. First, it questions the absence of breastfeeding as a legitimate philosophical topic, and, as a corollary, the invisibility of breastfeeding women (...) as moral or ethical subjects. Second, by drawing on Michel Foucault's account of ethics and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, it is suggested that breastfeeding is best conceptualized as a gendered and embodied ethical practice rather than an aspect of one's being. Finally, this materialist approach to theorizing breastfeeding is discussed in relation to the Lucy Lawless poster that was released in Aotearoa New Zealand to launch World Breastfeeding Week in August 2002. (shrink)

Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and management science—and presents their research on individualisation. We then clarify the concept of individualisation as it appears in the disciplinary casework by distinguishing three kinds of individualisation studied in and across these disciplines: Individualisation ONE as creating/changing individual differences (the (...) process that generates differences between individuals: intrapopulation or intraspecific variation/heterogeneity); Individualisation TWO as individualising applications (the tailoring or customising of something—information, treatment, a product or service, etc.—for an individual or specific group of individuals); and Individualisation THREE as social changes influencing autonomy, risk, and responsibilities (the process discussed under the rubric of sociological individualisation theory). Moreover, we analyse conceptual links between individualisation and individuality, and characterise different sorts of individuality that the disciplines study. This paper aims to promote interdisciplinary research concerning individualisation by establishing a common conceptual-theoretical basis, while leaving room for disciplinary differences. (shrink)

The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead, most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market approach is inadequate, and that its inadequacies can be remedied by studying sexual action as occurring within a specifically sexual field (...) , with a correlative sexual capital. Such a conception allows for historical and comparative analysis of changes in the organization of sexual action that are impeded by the use of a market metaphor, and also points to difficulties in Bourdieu's own treatment of the body qua body. (shrink)

This article makes the controversial argument that Bourdieu’s theory of practice offers both a model of transformation and social reproduction. However, it also claims that his account of cultural production is marred by two blind-spots. First, it contends that Bourdieu has neglected key forms of material support, notably, that offered, post-war, from the ‘left hand of the state’. The subsequent New Wave of 1950s and 1960s British drama had authors who possessed neither economic capital nor certified cultural capital. Secondly, it (...) interrogates Bourdieu’s conclusion that popular culture can never be source of canonized art. Adopting the view that Bourdieu focused too exclusively on legitimate culture, it seeks to contrast his theories on this point with the approach developed by Raymond Williams. The last section sketches a Bourdieusian analysis of Bourdieu. It reads his writings in the light of the different origins of the British and French fields of cultural studies. (shrink)

In constructing his renowned theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have integrated the key insights from phenomenology and successfully melded them with objectivist analysis. The contention here, however, is that while his vision of the social world may indeed be generally laudable, he did not take enough from phenomenology. More specifically, there are two concepts in Alfred Schutz 's body of work, which, if properly defined, disentangled from phenomenology, and appropriated, allow two frequently forwarded criticisms of Bourdieu's perspective to (...) be overcome: on the one hand, a particular interpretation of the concept of lifeworld can remedy identified weaknesses on the problem of individuation; while on the other hand, Schutz 's notion of the stock of knowledge can rectify Bourdieu's overly nonconscious depiction of agency. Given my overall support for Bourdieu's scheme and the fact that the extant criticisms on these two grounds are often excessive and obfuscatory, both the suggested elaborations will be prefaced by a clarificatory partial defense of his position. (shrink)

Extant research notes a tendency to propound the idea that female managers are secondary to men. Gender differences constitute an ethical issue and the discursive constructions of gender management are central to research in business ethics. Drawing on evidence gathered from a time–space intersection that has been widely neglected by research in this area, we address whether female business leaders develop gender-stereotypic management styles as well as their propensity to adopt masculine management patterns such as making risky decisions and implementing (...) formal management systems. Our findings suggest that gender-stereotypic management styles are chosen strategically and target-driven, which implies a selective use of masculine and feminine management styles. Furthermore, as part of the masculine approach, female business owners adopt risk-taking decisions and implement formal management systems. Our results provide support for the argument that gender is context dependent and, hence, the findings of this study may be useful for contemporary jurisdictions featuring male-dominated societies and a strong intervention by the State in the economy. (shrink)

Student engagement with science is a long-standing, central interest within science education research. In this article, we examine student engagement with science using a Bourdiusian lens, placing a particular emphasis on the notion of field. Over the course of one academic year, we collected data in an inner London secondary science classroom through lesson observations, interviews and discussion groups with students, and interviews with the teacher. We argue that applying Bourdieusian theory can help better understand differential patterns of student engagement (...) by directing attention to the alignment between students’ habitus and capital, and the field. Student behaviours that did not meet the requirements of the wider field were not recognised and valued as constituting engagement. Even when the ‘rules of the game’ of the science classroom were understood by the students, the tensions they experienced within the field made engaging with science impossible and undesirable. We discuss how a greater focus on the field can be useful for planning future interventions aimed at making science education more equitable. (shrink)

In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu’s social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu’s social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here it is suggested that in late modernity there is a lack of fit between habitus and field (...) in certain public spheres of action via an increasing transposition or movement of the feminine habitus from private to public spheres, which is linked to a heightened critical reflexivity vis-à-vis gender and to detraditionalization. In this article, however, a number of limits regarding this line of argument are highlighted, especially those flowing from the unproblematic coupling of reflexivity with detraditionalization. This exploration in turn leads to a critical discussion of Bourdieu’s ideas regarding social transformation. In particular it is asked why, when thinking about social transformation, does Bourdieu abandon his own principles regarding practice? (shrink)

This article examines the production of consecrated femininity in contemporary Polish convents. Drawing on qualitative data from 35 interviews in five religious communities the article explores the type of female agency which transforms the dominant model of Polish femininity instead of resisting it. Following Lois McNay’s concept of narrative identity, the article argues that female agency does not necessarily emerge out of subversion of the male-dominated Polish Catholic Church. Rather than simply being placed within discursive structures, Catholic nuns reflexively alter (...) them by using a mixture of gender ideology and spiritually driven gender work in order to produce coherent and socially meaningful narratives of consecrated femininity. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

This dissertation approaches the question of taste and aesthetic dislike from a combined sociological and psychoanalytic perspective. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art, I attempt to reconcile a view of aesthetic judgments as acts of distinction with a legitimate subjective dimension of aesthetic enjoyment. I make a parallel between taste and the psychoanalytic conception of the symptom and analyse the way they both transform the repressed content of the unconscious drives into a manifest one with the use of Freud’s (...) theory of the dream. I relate the question of pleasure and displeasure in art with the dichotomy Eros/Death Drive and argue that both aesthetic like and dislike arrive from a combination of these two drives, as in Lacan’s jouissance. I argue that the love of art can, as any love, be understood as a transference, the repetition of unconscious desires projected onto an other. In the conclusion, I refer to Sándor Ferenczi’s work and argue that one should relate to one’s aesthetic judgments with the same elasticity that the analyst should show towards the resistance of the analysand in order to understand her symptom. Finally, I reject a mystifying view of art and the sublime and argue that the very nature of art should instead be conceived as the objet a of our desires, i.e. that which cannot ever be fully obtained from the other but which at the same time structures our desires. (shrink)

Anorexia can be characterized as a profound transformation in social relations. These transformations occur across a number of overlapping fields, and include a range of institutional and domestic spaces and myriad mundane bodily practices in each. Through an examination of household space and a conventional treatment programme this article demonstrates the ways in which people with anorexia use and transform space. While there are many treatment programmes available for those with a diagnosis of anorexia, the ethnographic focus here is on (...) those who have undergone bed programmes in public hospitals. As a result of the particularities of time and space, these rooms are transformed into intimate spaces that represent domestic bedrooms, thus fundamentally changing the nature of shared space in institutionalized settings. These transformations, however, are not straightforward, for these bedrooms fuse a number of bodily practices (such as eating, sleeping and abluting) that are sharply demarcated in domestic architecture. In these hospital bedrooms, private and public space is conflated, reversed and made ambiguous. Moreover, this article argues that this institutional transformation of space reproduces many of the private practices associated with anorexia, a factor which has been overlooked in the recorded failure of these types of programmes. (shrink)

While the human agent must have the capacity for reflexivity, intentionality and consciousness, the same agent must also be affected by the social world in which she lives: herein lies the essence of the structure and agency dialectic. This paper argues that while some realists are in principle committed to a dialectical relationship between structure and agency, there is some dissonance between this commitment and the concepts of agency that they develop. I highlight the exclusion of the unconscious and habit (...) from realist notions of agency and argue that this oversight serves to unbalance the dialectic between structure and agency thereby leading to the over-empowerment of agency. The concepts of agency developed by Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu are discussed in this paper. Archer's concept of agency is argued to focus exclusively on reflexivity whilst neglecting to include the unconscious and habit. Giddens is shown to develop a much improved concept of agency, which includes the unconscious, however, his rejection of the independent causal powers of structure and agency problematises his commitment to the dialectic. A much improved approach to theorising agency, developed within a critical realist framework, is offered drawing on Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The paper concludes with a discussion of gender, and considers how the unconscious and habit can help to better understand the myriad ways in which gender functions in society. (shrink)

The existence of ‘postnatal’ or maternal depression (PND) is contested, and subject to various medico-legal and cultural definitions. Mothers remain subject to complex systems of scrutiny and regulation. In medico-legal discourse, postnatal distress is portrayed as a tragic pathology of mysterious (but probably hormonal) origin. A PND diagnosis denotes ‘imbalance’ in the immediate postnatal period, although women experience increased incidence of depression throughout maternity. Current treatment patterns emphasise medication and tend to elide the perspective of the individual sufferer in favour (...) of a blanket disease model. I emphasise the need for a feminist reassessment of maternal distress and the means available to ‘testify’ to its forms, and argue for PND to be analysed in biopolitical terms, perhaps as a ‘habitus’ materialising the low status and pervasive privatisation of Western mothers. (shrink)

This paper engages with the theme of disgrace from a Bourdieusian point of view. Starting out from a specific definition of ‘grace’ in terms of misrecognition, it goes on to consider some of the ways in which disgrace can be generated and some of the ways it can be handled by the disgraced party. While there are certainly many intra-field modalities of the genesis of disgrace, including violation of the rules of the game, the paper also emphasizes that disgrace can (...) be generated by cross-field events, necessitating a switch of perspective from individuals in one field to individuals in multiple fields. This is also true of strategies for coping with disgrace. (shrink)